WYPR Arts

What We're Reading, March 30-April 5

Published March 30, 2010 at 6:00 AM EDT

A new comedy from Ian McEwan; the true-life adventures of the Victorian Brit who stole the secrets of tea from China; a Kenyan contemporary of Obama's father remembers the Mau Mau rebellion; and a new Russian master spins surprising fictional gold from the Godot-like tale of Soviet citizens waiting in an endless line.

Solar

By Ian McEwan

Physicist Michael Beard won a Nobel Prize some years before the novel opens, and he hasn't done much since except mess up yet another marriage (his fifth), try to pick up a lot of women and gain weight. As head of a new British institute studying climate change, he's floundering — and messing up his life even further by covering up the death of a younger colleague who was having an affair with his estranged wife. But, as comedy sometimes has it, things go in this book from worse to bad, and Beard makes his way almost all of the way back to the top of the Nobel heap before ...

Hardcover, 304 pages; Nan A. Talese; list price, $26.95; publication date, March 30

For All The Tea In China

How England Stole The World's Favorite Drink And Changed History

By Sarah Rose

Sarah Rose traces the adventures of British botanist Robert Fortune, who went deep inside the interior of China in the mid-19th century to gather seeds and samples of the country's most prized tea plants. Fortune was sent on the mission by Britain's East India Company. After decades of relying on China for tea, British businessmen decided to try to build their own tea industry in India. The mission was risky. China's imperial rulers forbade foreigners to travel in the country's interior, so Fortune learned Chinese, shaved his head, attached a long black braid to his scalp and passed himself off as Chinese. His mission was so successful that before he died, India surpassed China as the world's biggest tea producer.

Hardcover, 272 pages; Viking; list price, $25.95; publication date, March 18

Dreams In A Time of War

A Childhood Memoir

By Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

Despite Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong'o's delicious name, his many books in English, his literary prizes, political activism and years of living, writing and teaching in the U.S., he's probably still not as well known in this country as other African writers of his generation, especially the Nigerians Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka. Oddly, this small book, a memoir, may change that, if for no other reason than it offers a penetrating look into the world that shaped the father of our current U.S. president. Thiong'o was born in 1938, two years after Barack Obama Sr. And, like the elder Obama, he traveled far and endured much on the path to an education that would change his life, even as the world he had known was falling away. Dreams in a Time of War tells the story of this young man's coming of age as the British colonial system was crumbling, both of its own weight and under the bloody threat of the Mau Mau rebellion.

Hardcover, 272 pages; Pantheon; list price, $24.95; publication date, March 9

The Line

By Olga Grushin

On her way to the school where she teaches, Anna comes across a shuttered kiosk with dozens of people queued up in front of it. What could they possibly be selling? New curtains? Leather boots? Perhaps oranges? Her imagination runs wild. It's the early days of the Soviet Union and any supplement to her meager rations would be welcome. When it's revealed they're selling tickets to an illicit concert conducted by a famous composer now living in exile, Anna's musician husband gets caught up in the anticipation. The people stay in the line as months pass, every day disappointed when a sign is hung in the window: "Closed for accounting," "Will reopen Monday," "Will reopen in January." The queue becomes a community, held in place by faith and hope, a microcosm of life in a newly communist state.